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Regarding the newspost, I never could remember Second Reality or the Future Crew, though I remember the demo vividly. I'm not surprised at all that the members of the demogroup went on to found all kinds of shit we know and love.

Second Reality blew my mind when I found it on a BBS.

However, the Moleman's explanation text at that video site is copied from wikipedia. Not cool. Or... he wrote it. Cool! It's either cool or uncool.

Whoa. The entire time I was watching that I was going "WHY." The situation Tycho describes is absolutely fascinating, and I am certain that without having been there (so to speak) that something is lost.

However, the Moleman's explanation text at that video site is copied from wikipedia. Not cool. Or... he wrote it. Cool! It's either cool or uncool.

I believe the guy that made the movie's landing page (not 'moleman' - that's the best English translation of the original Hungarian title, roughly slang for 'underground') also wrote the text on Wikipedia, so hopefully cool ;)

Whoa. The entire time I was watching that I was going "WHY."

Because! Why do people paint pictures? Actually, a better comparison would be 'why do people engage in super hard math problem competitions just for fun.' The competitions themselves aren't going to get you anywhere, but the skills you need to succeed in them are probably going to help your career otherwise. Hence why many demosceners end up working in games development, as professional 'creative types', or etc. To be successful in the scene you have to have both talent AND a very robust work ethic - while also having at least some social skills, because of how demoparties are set up as social events.

For example, arguably the top coder/programmer in the scene right now is a guy who does 3D graphics development for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe as his day job, and then comes home and works hardcore on demos. During PAX, he was at the Revision demoparty in Germany, getting extremely, extremely drunk. ;)

However, the Moleman's explanation text at that video site is copied from wikipedia. Not cool. Or... he wrote it. Cool! It's either cool or uncool.

I believe the guy that made the movie's landing page (not 'moleman' - that's the best English translation of the original Hungarian title, roughly slang for 'underground') also wrote the text on Wikipedia, so hopefully cool ;)

Whoa. The entire time I was watching that I was going "WHY."

Because! Why do people paint pictures? Actually, a better comparison would be 'why do people engage in super hard math problem competitions just for fun.' The competitions themselves aren't going to get you anywhere, but the skills you need to succeed in them are probably going to help your career otherwise. Hence why many demosceners end up working in games development, as professional 'creative types', or etc. To be successful in the scene you have to have both talent AND a very robust work ethic - while also having at least some social skills, because of how demoparties are set up as social events.

For example, arguably the top coder/programmer in the scene right now is a guy who does 3D graphics development for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe as his day job, and then comes home and works hardcore on demos. During PAX, he was at the Revision demoparty in Germany, getting extremely, extremely drunk. ;)

Is there a specific word that describes those people that do amazing things with incredibly small files? Like, the team that created a working, decent graphics FPS in a stupidly, stupidly small file?

Oh man, I so fondly remember the demo scene. I remember the display hacks on pirated software in the 80's too; talking skulls, color bars and lots of barley readable bouncing fonts made of particles (which mostly looked like L.A. graffiti to my eyes) on my Apple ][. I re-discovered the demo scene off of BBS' in the early nineties and was amazed by the kind of things they could do with limited resources, some of them were just 4k executables but had impressive animated 3D models and textures generated programmatically.

I showed them, including Second Reality, off at the company I worked for called Berkeley Systems and that convinced them to send some managers to a Demo Scene meetup in Amsterdam to try and recruit some tallent. Sadly nothing came from it (except a couple of managers spending a weekend stoned, so I heard). To this day I keep around a folder of demo's to show to developers, because look at what they can do! Right now I've got "fr-041: debris" running in a virtual machine, it's essentially a concept music video with impressive and clever graphics crammed into a 174k executable. There's some real serious compressions and algorithmically generated content wizardry going on in there.

I'll have to catch up on the scene.

ExistentialExistenceException: Your thread encountered a NULL pointer and entered a state of non-being.

I'd just like to point out that there's no pre-rendered animations/video here, this is all rendered in real time.
Well, at least when you run the actual demo. A Youtube video isn't quite the same.

edit: I watched the video on Youtube now, and it doesn't do the demo justice at all. For one thing, the video is too slow to keep up with a lot of the movements.
If at all possible, you should run the actual demo, maybe in DOSBox.

Personal Quote: "I stare into the void as her molted carapace unfurls, her soaking thorax begging for my gentle touch... and she whispers: "krev unda xcryu!!!". Her slender neck riddled with eggsacks and vestigial maws beckons for my tender head, but what is that I see? Tis a hedgehog, nested upon one of her seven shoulder, her quills beckon for me as well. I now surrender myself as I am filled with countless fertilized eggs and my hands grace the spiky sensuous quills... Yes, yes - a thousand times yes..."

some of them were just 4k executables but had impressive animated 3D models and textures generated programmatically.

4k and 64k intros are still where a lot of the really cutting-edge stuff is at. Google for an intro from 2009 called Elevated (use "Elevated 4k intro" or something -- you'll get a bazillion links to both the 4k executable and videos of it running). Real-time almost photorealistic mountains and light effects, plus music, in FOUR KILOBYTES.

Right now I've got "fr-041: debris" running in a virtual machine, it's essentially a concept music video with impressive and clever graphics crammed into a 174k executable. There's some real serious compressions and algorithmically generated content wizardry going on in there.

Farbrausch have made a lot of good stuff in the last 10 or so years. We also showed .kkrieger at the panel, which was Farbrausch's tech-demo 96-kilobyte FPS. It's not cutting edge in an absolute sense nowadays -- until you realize it's all generated out of a 96k executable!